Colin GreenlandRecensioni

Greenland, Colin. Take Back Plenty. 1990. Tabitha Jute No. 1. SF Gateway, 2013.
In most space operas, human beings find some way to travel to the stars and either create or join a galactic civilization. In Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland turns these memes upside down. The aliens have come to us, filling the solar system with extraterrestrial visitors of several species. They have also told us to stay home in the Sol system. Thus, there is interstellar trade and culture, but human colonies are outclassed by large-scale alien habitats. Our heroine, Tabitha Jute, is the owner of a small freighter who makes a marginal living as a trader. The freighter has a damaged AI, called Alice Liddell, after the little girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. To keep it sane, Tabitha tells it stories, some fictional and some from her own past. The main plot begins when Tabitha contracts with a fast-talking, seductive impresario to take him to an alien space habitat called Plenty to pick up his cabaret troupe. Adventure ensues. Tabitha has a well-developed personality with more depth to her character than we usually adventure heroines. The conversations between Tabitha and Alice are charming. The alien menagerie is complex and well-detailed. I don’t know what the competition was, but I am not surprised that Take Back Plenty won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I plan to read the other two volumes of the trilogy. 4 stars.

This wasn't earth-shattering by any stretch, but it was extremely enjoyable. I was going to go straight onto the second one in the trilogy, unfortunaltely it gets really abyssmal reviews(on Amazon at least) so I'm now not at all sure I'll be reading it at all. I can't even bring myself to just skip the second and go onto the third, since that one only gets average reviews and says the first book is a lot better anyway.

Still, this one was good. Tabitha Jute is a well written character and her companions are interesting(especially the cherub). I'm not sure how it managed to pick up two awards in the same year, or even in any year. It's not that it's a bad read, it isn't, but I'm sure there are more deserving reads out there. I was in just the right frame of mind for a bit of pulpy science fiction though so that helped my enjoyment.

Very good read. Worth your time.

I’ve been a fan of Greenland’s writing for many years, especially the Plenty books and Harm’s Way. He was very active throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as a critic, an editor of Interzone, and a writer, but his last published novel was Finding Helen in 2002. Which is a shame. The Hour of the Thin Ox is one of three literary fantasies, the Daybreak trilogy, he published in the 1980s. I don’t actually recall if they’re set in the same universe – I suspect yes, if only because they’re lumped together as a trilogy. Anyway, in The Hour of the Thin Ox, the heir to a wealthy merchant family in Bryland finds her fortunes so diminished she ends up joining the army to fight the empire invading the countries to the north. This is not a novel that would really pass muster in 2020. It’s well written, but there’s an uncomfortable thread of orientalism running throughout the story, with its emphasis on the Far-East-inspired Escalans and their drive to expand and assimilate other nations and cultures. The second half of the novel takes place in a jungle region, partly conquered by the Escalans, but they’re in the process of killing off its indigenes. The Brylander now leads a small guerrilla group against the Escalan invaders. And, of course, the indigenes are neither as savage nor as primitive as the Escalans insist. The story seemed like it was going somewhere with its jungle warfare plot, but other than a big set-piece, it more or less petered out. A novel that felt like it was part of a larger series and not a complete instalment, despite being well written with some effective world-building.

A solar system space opera. Humans and some aliens are confined to the Solar System by an advanced alien race called the Capellans. Space barge pilot Tabitha Jute and her ship the Alice Liddell are down on their luck on Mars. Tabitha falls in with some disreputable characters and a simple mission spirals into something which changes the entire system.

Oh boy. Look at all three covers of this trilogy - note the wildly different styles. Note too the name of Tabitha Jute's ship: The Alice Liddell." If you're ready for a bizarre ride, go for it. It took me much too long to read this, the first of the three, and I'm not going to read the others."

Dealing with interplanetary Sailing ships, we have an author with a Dickensian style writing a father-search novel in an entertaining style. Deserving of more readers if LT has given me an honest count.

This one was a deception. I was waiting for something crazy, steampunk and dickensian but that's not what I found. Sure, there are fun parts, but at some moments, I felt that I couldn't care less about what would happen to Sophie and the others.

I had a "too much of too many things" feelings. Too many aliens, too many planets. Everything just mentioned, nothing explored in depth. So I stayed out. There was so many great ideas in that novel. I loved the big vessels traveling with all sails on from planet to planet. Quite a sight in my head. But that will be the only thing I will remember about the book.

I love strange worlds, I really do. It was just a bit too much for me and it made me feel like an outsider.

Strange story of a new arrival in an unnamed country, who has been offered a job there. He meets a woman at a party who takes him to her shack in the woods...

A group of genetically-altered children grow up in an artificial sequestered garden environment, watched over by benevolent machine intelligences and tended to by machine servitors. This is a prequel to some of the spin-off characters in Colin Greenland's "Plenty" sequence (Take back Plenty, The Plenty principle, Mother of Plenty), produced as a chapbook for Novacon 21 in 1991. The resemblence between this story and the BBC children's television series "Teletubbies" is so marked that Colin ought perhaps to consider legal action...

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1459691.html

I have got a third of the way through this and still don't know what is going on, and have forgotten who the characters are, despite having read the two previous books in the series, so I'm putting it away.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1423160.html

Seasons of Plenty has the massive spaceship Plenty, commandeered by Tabitha Jute at the end of the previous book, setting off for (with any luck) Proxima Centauri, loaded with many inhabitants of different communities and factions, and also endowed with a certain life of its own. Not a lot actually happens - there is a feeling of setting the scene for the third book, while just travelling from A to B. It's oddly reminiscent of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was reading at the same time, except that Plenty really is a closed social space (which Macondo is not). It's difficult to imagine such an enterprise being quite as anarchic (or indeed diverse) as Greenland paints it, but if you can swallow that premise it is fun.½

This is a chapter extract, not the whole book (which doesn't have the bit after the colon, in its title).

I didn't know that when I was starting to write this view, and amazed that no one else had it in their collections.

I'm not amazed that this bit of ephemera is so obscure. I'm pretty amazed that the wonderful book that it's taken from has under 50 owners!

http://nhw.livejournal.com/598430.html

Pretty good (as you would hope for a book that won both the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards). Well above-average space opera, feisty female protagonist, solar system where humanity is vying for space and influence with various alien species (like Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence but less depressing). Mild rewriting of history to allow us Mars as desert planet with breathable atmosphere and Venus as tropical hell. Generally good fun. Will probably read the other two.½

*note to self. Copy from A.

*note to self. Copy from A.

ZB5